The Battle of Hampton Roads, Or How to Change Everything in Two Days
The Battle of Hampton Roads, or how to change everything in two days.
Alejandro Vidal Crespo Service Director, Investment Strategy
MONTHLY STRATEGY REPORT March 2015 Monthly Strategy Report. March 2015
The Battle of Hampton Roads, or how to change everything in two days.
Innovation is crucial in all fields. We cannot fall victim to complacency; we must react to the innovations of others, though they may be our rivals. As an illustration, we offer a graphic historic event in which “you innovate or sink”.
On the morning of 8 March 1862, the USS Cumberland, an elegant, wooden sailing frigate, was anchored off the land batteries of Newport News, in the Chesapeake Bay, United States.
The USS Cumberland formed part of a flotilla of five ships loyal to the Union that, together with the land batteries at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, maintained the naval blockade of two of the Confederacy’s main cities, Richmond and Norfolk, across the bay. Shortly after midday, a Confederate flotilla was spotted heading up the James River sailing directly toward the Union squadron, led by a steam-powered, ironclad warship. Deviating from the usual pattern of naval engagement, the infiltrator headed straight for Cumberland; the frigate opened fire but the munitions bounced off the iron plates without penetrating.
The strange ship only opened fire from short distances while ramming her opponent with a metal bow ram beneath the waterline. The USS Cumberland sank rapidly, with her colours flying in the wind and her guns firing until the last minute when, at 3:35 p.m., she went under, dragging 121 seamen down with her. The CSS Virginia, formerly the USS Merrimack, had claimed her first victim. After Cumberland, her counterpart in the blockade, the USS Congress (with 100 crewmen aboard) also succumbed, and another three Union vessels, witnessing the fate of the two frigates, ordered their ships grounded in shallow waters under the protection of the land batteries, which did not prevent another of them, the USS Minnesota, from suffering serious damage. War at sea would never be the same, not even the next day.
Though steam power had already been integrated in the fleets of the time (without venturing further, the USS Minnesota, present at the battle beside Cumberland, and to which we will return later, was a steam-powered frigate), and the first ironclad ships had already been built (French and British fleets had been experimenting with these vessels), they had never before seen combat and their performance in actual operations remained questionable. Until that day. But let us take a step back to put the battle in context.
On 19 April 1861, the Civil War broke out when the Confederate army attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. President Lincoln immediately ordered a naval blockade of the Confederacy. On 27 April that same year, the states of North Carolina and Virginia joined the Confederacy, and with them, one of the navy’s key facilities: the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth. Though the commanding officers were loyal to the Union, the same could not be said of the infantrymen or the local population, so loyalists were ordered to destroy the base and set fire to the ships, lest it fall into Confederate hands. One of the best vessels in the yard, the steam-powered USS Merrimack only sustained damage to the superstructure, leaving the hull and engines intact.
The leaders of the Confederate South knew they could never equal the North in terms of industrial capacity (meaning, the number of ships), but if they wanted to break the naval blockade that isolated them from the world of trade, they needed a ground-breaking idea that would level the battlefield. Accordingly, the Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, commissioned a group of engineers to develop –in record time– a modern vessel that was so superior to the existing ships, it would single-handedly tip the war at sea in their favour. The engineers salvaged the hull and the Monthly Strategy Report. March 2015 engines of the steamship Merrimack, covered it with armoured iron cladding, reduced the number of guns in exchange for larger calibre weapons (only 10 versus 50 on the USS Cumberland) and installed a ram under the waterline: the first ironclad warship, the CSS Virginia, was born in February of 1862.
These efforts did not go unnoticed by the North, who had learned of the Merrimack’s development through spies, and although the odds were against them, they initiated their own project to build a steam-powered, armoured warship just in case. After studying a number of projects, they chose to build the most innovative of all, based on the design of Swedish engineer, John Ericsson. The ship’s armaments would be reduced to just two large calibre guns mounted on a steam-powered rotating turret that could be operated by just one man. Only days before the Battle of Hampton Roads, the USS Monitor was launched in Brooklyn, New York. Now, let us return to the battle where we left off.
After scuttling Congress and Cumberland, Virginia turned her attention toward the next Union frigate, the USS Minnesota. Having witnessed the fate of his comrades and noticing the deep draft of Virginia, the Captain wisely decided to avoid confrontation in deep waters and headed for the shallows, where he would not only be able to maintain a safe distance from Virginia, he would have backing from the coastal artillery. He purposefully ran the ship aground, where Minnesota continued to suffer shelling from the ironclad, but before nightfall, with damage to her smokestack (reducing her speed), and as the tide receded, the CSS Virginia retreated to base for repairs with the intention of returning the next day and completing the task. She had left three Union vessels aground, one badly damaged, and two at the bottom of the bay: an unmitigated victory.
The next day, after some minor repairs, Virginia once again sailed from her base to the battlefield. She headed directly toward the USS Minnesota, and what appeared to be a small steam-powered tugboat trying to buoy the ship. It was the USS Monitor, the Union’s own ironclad warship that had arrived at dawn to try to level the odds. Upon learning about events in the Chesapeake, and fearing that Virginia would sail for its cities, even up the Potomac River to the White House, the North’s generals sent the warship to Hampton Roads and positioned her defensively to protect the crippled USS Minnesota.
Virginia fired the first round in the initial showdown between the ironclads, but the shot flew past Monitor and struck Minnesota. This began an engagement that lasted more than three hours, mostly at close range. Though the artillery of both ships had the potential to pierce through armour, neither succeeded in doing so. In the case of Virginia, because she lacked adequate munitions; deployed initially to fight wooden ships, her guns were supplied only with shell rather than armour-piercing shot. In the case of Monitor, because her guns had not been properly tested to carry a charge of 30kg of gunpowder per shot, they operated at half charge, which did not give the projectile sufficient momentum to penetrate Virginia’s armour. After the confrontation, which ended in stalemate, both ships returned to their bases. They spent the remainder of the conflict trying to goad other vessels to attack, without engaging in combat. The CSS Virginia was ultimately destroyed by her crew: with the blockade unbroken, Norfolk was of little strategic use to the Confederacy, and the draft of the ship was too great to permit her to pass up the river toward Richmond, so, rather than allow her to fall into enemy hands, she was destroyed in May of 1862. The USS Monitor sunk off the coast of Cape Hatteras on the last day of the year 1862. Her low freeboard made her highly unseaworthy in rough waters, and she felt prey to the waves.
Despite the unfortunate outcome of both ships, their short lives completely changed the rules of naval engagement. Impressed by the ease with which one ship overpowered an entire flotilla, the major navies of the world declared an end to the era of wooden hulls. In terms of design, the Monitor prevailed, and her rotating turrets and concentrated firepower still appear on warships today. The US Navy improved the design to make it operational in high seas, and Russia, France and Great Britain ordered their navies to quickly replace their fleets with armoured ships. Virginia’s bow ram also became the standard, prevailing almost until the First World War, when improvements in ballistics made such Monthly Strategy Report. March 2015 an approach between ships unthinkable.
A revolution in the shipbuilding industry was to follow, and just two decades later, when war broke out in Cuba, the contending vessels would have been seen as nothing short of spaceships to observers of the Battle of Hampton Roads. The USS New York (1895) moved at speeds of 20 knots, unimaginable in the mid-nineteenth century, with a displacement of 8,000 tonnes, compared to the 6 knots and 1,000 tonne displacement of the USS Monitor, a small colossus, like her rival and companion in history, the CSS Virginia in the South, USS Merrimack in the North.
Both fought bravely and earned their place in the history of the Chesapeake Bay, which is, incidentally, an enormous crater (85 km in diameter and 1.3 km deep) caused by the impact of a meteor 4 km in diameter 35 million years ago. What better place for a history battle?